Health and sanitation laws require the use of head coverings by people engaged in the public preparation and serving of consumable food and beverages. In order to abide by said laws and economically provide head coverings in an industry plagued by the rapid turnover of help, restaurant owners now use disposable head coverings, i.e., hats fabricated from paper or inexpensive cloth-like materials. Restauranteurs have discovered that by buying bulk quantities of disposable head coverings, costs are kept at an affordable level.
One type of disposable head covering is a pleated longitudinally elongated, cylindrically shaped hat, popularly called a "chef's cap". The chef's cap is provided with an upper closure member such as a disc-like crown member permanently glued or otherwise secured to the upper portion of the elongated chef's cap. Such a disposable chef's cap with a shape-sustaining crown member is disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 4,068,319.
Since it is desirable to ship the caps from the factory to the customer in an assembled condition, the caps must be foldable for transit and storage and must be able to sustain the cylindrical shape of the cap when the customer is ready to use same. Prior art devices have recognized the availability of the crown member to perform a shape-sustaining function. However, it has been found that the shape-sustaining crown members of prior art caps which have either (a) been stored in a folded condition for long periods of time, or (b) been repeatedly folded and unfolded, lose the ability to maintain the cylindrical shape of the caps.
It is therefore the principal object of the present invention to provide a collapsible, disposable head covering which includes a shape-sustaining crown member wherein the ability of said crown member to maintain the circular shape of the cylindrical portion of the cap is not lost due to either (a) prolonged periods of storage in a folded condition, or (b) repeated folding and unfolding of the crown member.
It has also been determined that prior art chef's caps which relied on pleated cylindrical walls (a) lack sufficient rigidity to retain the cylindrical shape of the cap throughout the length thereof and (b) are expensive to manufacture.
It is therefore a further object of the present invention to provide a shape-sustaining crown member for a disposable, cylindrically-shaped head covering wherein the longitudinal rigidity of the cylindrical wall is reinforced by providing an inexpensive corrugated sheet adhesively secured to an inner liner.
These and other objects and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to one ordinarily skilled in the art from the following description of a preferred embodiment of the invention as illustrated in the accompanying drawings and as more fully disclosed in the specification and claims which follow.